No other audio company has the two-sided marketplace that we have built at Spotify — a marketplace that benefits artists and creators along with consumers. Nobody else has both audio advertising and subscription revenue model at scale globally. Nobody else in music has the engineering capabilities and the expertise in audio that we have at Spotify. And with the addition of Gimlet and Anchor, Spotify will now become the leading global podcast publisher with more shows than any other company. These levers of growth have the potential to double the size of our industry. And no other global company is as focused on this one thing — audio — as Spotify.

Success in podcasting (and other forms of audio that they might think of next) means that they finally have:

Content with zero marginal cost (increased music streams = more fees to record labels)

A key differentiator from other music streaming services in the market, particularly Apple Music